Leon Golub’s art work has been particularly influential over the last couple of years on my understanding of how art can communicate social issues that deal with difficult subject matter. His large scale works depict the effects of power structures in society, the work often has focused on both perperator and the victim,take for example The Vietnam Series, 1970s. The dark subject matter has content that has a challenging and sobering effect when viewed. Golubs work emerged from the impact of events culminating from America’s involvement in the Vietnam war and consequently thereafter his work has gone on to depict, unveil and reveal the one dimensional structures of power within his society. John Bird said, “Golub understood violence, not as an isolated inhuman phenonomen but as an expression of power and powerlessness…all too human conditions (Bird ,J, 2011, Echoes of the Real. p11). London; Reaction Books. These words concerning power and powerlessness reminded me of an event at UCS this week when on 27th January people gathered for the Holocaust memorial service,(a now yearly event) whose motto was,” We will not forget, We will understand and learn,We will raise the aiarm and protest, We must guard the future.” this motto to me sums up what Golub attempted to do within his work -” to raise the alarm”- to draw people’s attention to the way power was used and abused, using art as a vehicle to protest about events firstly concerning the Vietnam war, along with his with his later works in the 1980s – Mercenaries Series, which Golub produced to draw attention to the way state power structures used coersive forces in Nicaragua and other south American countries that were deemed a threat to the American way of life. This again reminded me of the Holocaust memorial service where a UCS lecturer Dr Packard gave a brief talk on the historical background to the Holocaust one aspect of the talk that struck me was when he expanded on the word Genocide the phrase was coined by Professor Raphael Lemkin who emigrated to the USA a Polish lawyer of Jewish decent, Genocide was not heard of before 1943. Genos – greek for tribe /race. Cide -latin for killing.The word Genocide was killing based on destroying a culture and destroying memory-in a sense a wiping out.Dr Packard also touched on how ordinary people got caught up in also being perpertrators and the reason given was not that they were following orders but that they were taking part in an ideology and also reasons of peer pressure dynamics and the brutalization of war. At the end of the Nuremberg trials justice R Jackson said ” The very essence of the Nuremberg Charter is that individuals have international duties which trancend national obligations of obedience imposed by the state” Jackson Cited in Pilger,2003,p27).By Miller.D.(ed)Tell me Lies:Propaganda and Media Distortion in The attack on Iraq. London.Pluto press. In essence this is what strikes me about Golub and his work he was an artist who expressed these values of his obligation as an individual, his duty was to express visualy issues that troubled him concerning a states authority to control public opinion via mass media, his intention to alert people to the abuse of power in society particularly concerning states military actions. He considered himself a painter who depicted historical events through his work.
Martha Roslers- work also emerged from the Vietnam war and the previous war in Iraq. The Gray Drapes, (2008 ) a photomontage work, the medium Rosler used to communicate and critique the states violence, abuse, and horrors of war on civilians, caught in war conflicts.
